Devices including mobile telephones, smart phones, personal digital assistance (PDAs) with wireless communication capabilities, two-way pagers and the like can communicate using more than one wireless network, wireless communication protocols, or wireless technologies. For example, dual or multi-mode devices, such as devices with radio access technologies can provide access to wireless local area networks (WLAN) (e.g. access technologies under the Wi-Fi brand), wireless metropolitan area network (WMAN) (e.g. access technologies under the WiMAX brand) and wireless wide area networks (WWAN) (e.g. cellular technologies like GSM/GPRS EDGE, UTMS, HSPA, CDMA, WCDMA, etc.). Selection among the different radio access technologies may be driven by the different properties of the technologies such as bandwidth, range, cost, and power consumption, among other considerations. Selection may be an initial selection of a technology or a re-selection/evaluation particularly in view of a change to real-time conditions.
The determination to use a particular communication protocol or technology over another protocol or technology for a particular device or for an application running on the device can be based on a number of factors. For instance, there may be a cost difference and/or quality considerations associated with the use of one particular protocol or technology that may make the use more desirable than the other protocol or technology. It is therefore desirable to have a mechanism that seeks to optimize communications on a packet-by-packet basis for multi-mode capable devices, that is, that seeks to improve communications for multi-mode capable devices.